123: Polymorphous Perversity and Gender Pleasure feat. Lucie Fielding

Abby and Patrick are joined by therapist and sexuality educator Lucie Fielding. First, the three talk about Lucie’s path to clinical work and the significance of her book, Trans Sex, just out in a revised Second Edition. They then turn to Freud’s classic, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), putting that text, and the broader legacy of Freud’s views on sexuality, in dialogue with contemporary questions of trans embodiment and sexual identity. This means reckoning with the ways that Freud’s account of sexual development is alternately retrograde and radical, both of his time and far ahead of it. The three focus in particular on Freud’s idea of “polymorphous perversity,” and the ambiguities of his distinction between “sexual object” and “sexual aim,” exploring how Freud’s vision of human sexuality as radically contingent and plastic may offer possibilities for thinking constructively and more inclusively about pleasure and the diverse range of human sexual expression.

Lucie’s website is here: https://luciefielding.com/

The new edition of Trans Sex is here: https://www.routledge.com/Trans-Sex-Nurturing-Trans-Erotic-Embodiment-and-Gender-Pleasure/Fielding/p/book/9781032737218

Lucie’s recommended reading includes:

Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini, Gender Without Identity

José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Tourmaline, Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson

Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, Hatred of Sex

Audre Lorde, “Uses of The Erotic: The Erotic as Power”

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